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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Odilia Roberts from the Derby Action Team on behalf of Maria McIntyre and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

For us, in Holland, the war years were quite different from those years in the UK.

How well I can remember how the war started for us in the beginning of May 1940.

My mother and father, four sisters, one brother and myself, lived in the north west of Holland in a village called Amstelveen, which is situated between Amsterdam and Schiphol Airport. Early one morning at about 4 o’clock my sister and I awoke with the noise of German bombers flying over our village. We saw a big black cloud hanging over Schiphol. The Dutch authorities had created a large smoke screen as a deterrent for the German planes to land.

The war lasted only four days for our small country, then the German soldiers, the occupiers, came and stayed for five long years. They had bombed Rotterdam, hitting a big hospital where my Auntie Anna was a nurse; only the nurses’ quarters were hit so she lost all her belongings. But luckily not her bankbook!!

When the war started, the office where I worked was situated beside Het ij (a broad river), nearly opposite our office, across the river there was an oil refinery (Shell), so in those few days of the war the Dutch people burnt the oil causing a massive black cloud. They didn’t want the oil to fall into German hands. It burned for three days. My boss got frightened and gave us all a day off work!
We could see this smoke from our home in Amstelveen — a few kilometres away.

Although we resented the Germans, life went on, but it was a different life. Our food was rationed but we were never hungry until the winter and spring of 1944/45 after the Arnhem disaster (Operation Market Garden). The south of Holland was liberated but the north was not. Before the bad winter I courted a lad whose parents had a dairy and he made sure that our family had plenty of milk and he often gave us potato coupons. Unfortunately we split up before the bad winter!

From September 1944 life became terrible. No food, no gas, no coal and no electricity. The only food our family had was soup - you needed a magnifying glass to see the few pieces of meat - from a local kitchen that had to be fetched every night and a horrible tasting blackish small loaf a week. The black loaf was just big enough for three thin slices a day, one slice for breakfast and two for lunch, not much food for a three-hour walk to and from work.
Unless you were lucky enough to buy something on the black market!

Sweden, who was not in the war sent every person in Holland a nice, big, white, loaf of bread via the Red Cross.

My mother, who would have done her utmost in the years before to try and feed the family as best as she could, found it virtually impossible to give us a decent meal. She herself lost a lot a weight.

In the beginning of 1939 we had moved from Amsterdam North to Amstelveen. My father was a keen gardener and he also kept hens, there he built a lovely hen house. Alas, the war put paid to keeping hens, the proper food for chickens could not be bought any more. So the hen house stood empty for years, until 1944/45 and as we had no coal etc. and our home got so cold that my dad felt obliged to make firewood of his hen house. It broke his heart! The wooden shed where we used to keep our bicycles went the same way. Shortly after the war my dad bought a lot of 2nd hand bricks and built a shed, but he never kept chickens any more. He used the shed to do his joinery! The neighbours’ children and grandchildren used to go to ‘Opa’ (granddad) to get their broken toys repaired!

We were not allowed to transport any kind of food. With food being so scarce a lot of people took their gold rings and valuables to certain unscrupulous farms to buy some food, which sometimes the Germans confiscated. After the war I heard that people were so hungry that they walked for kilometres on an empty stomach to try to get some food.
Those farmers who were paid in gold got very rich after the war but those who had been paid in money and banked it lost a lot of it as new bank notes came out a few years after the war. As these people couldn’t account for the large amounts of money in the bank the authorities knew it was Black Market money. All this I learnt after the war. Serves them right for their greediness and their disregard for their own starving people.

In 1940 we still had the wintertime hours. Germany’s had changed, so one evening on the 10 o’clock news it was announced that we had to put the clocks forward two hours, one difference from the time between Holland and Germany and one hour summertime.
You can imagine what a chaos it was the next day! Many people had not heard the evening news, maybe they were already asleep.

Soon we had to give our good money in, coins etc. it was replaced with some cheap metal (I still have some).

After a year or so the soldiers wanted our bikes. They just stopped cyclists in the street and demanded their bikes and gave them an IOU. Mine, being old, was never asked for.

As we heard too much news we had to give in our radios, they were of course, pieces of furniture in those days!
My father had made a cabinet for a radio and batteries etc. (He was very good at joinery. He had made some of their furniture when he married my mother). When the Germans commandeered our radio sets my father took out all the important parts so that he could make another radio when the war was over, and gave in the leftovers. I was lucky as I had a friend, Truus, whose parents possessed two radios, they gave in one only, so my friend told me the latest war news, especially the last most important news of the last months when the Allies and Russians were advancing on Germany.

We had a Jewish quarter in Amsterdam and I have seen the Jews being taken away in lorries. How those people have suffered. It was terrible to see this.

Our Dutch boys were sent to Germany to do war work there. Many did not come back; life was too awesome there, too many hours, not enough food and no proper medical care.

If we had been ‘naughty’ sometimes we had to be in at 8 o’clock, 11 o’clock was normal time, and don’t be out after that time!

Often the Germans were shooting when the Allied bombers came over on the way to Germany, if we were out we had to find a safe place, we did not have special shelters. One evening my friend Truus and I stood in a bus shelter while the shrapnel clattered on the roof and on one occasion we stood flat against the wall of a building, which was a convent.

In 1942 some friends and I went on holiday and we stayed on a farm that was not far from the German border. One night the Allies dropped leaflets, a warning to the people in Germany. This was, of course, in the German language. We all had a leaflet and could read it for we had learned German at school.

My brother sent me a copy of a reprint of ‘De Vliegende Hollander’ — ‘A Flying Dutchman’ stating the signing of the end of the war, first in Rheins and then in Germany.

He also remembers that the American and British planes dropped small pieces of silver paper to distort the German radar of the anti aircraft guns. The Germans tried to make us believe that the silver paper was a kind of ‘incendiary bombs’ but of course nobody believed them.

As my bike was ‘on it’s last legs’ I walked to work (to Amsterdam) and back, 2 x 1½ hours each day for 4 days a week, we worked until 4 o’clock when it was getting dark. I lost a stone in weight. Every day we went to bed at six o’clock as it was the only warm place during the night.

When the war was over things improved but it took a long time for life to get back to normal. The Allies flew over our village in bombers and dropped food through the hatches, I can still remember standing in the road, looking up and seeing a big square gaping hole.

Both the Allies and the Germans had to rebuild their lives and their towns.

Let there never be a World War 3.

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